The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 30 页

For Schmitt these kinds of piracies and perversities are always threatening to undermine the regulatory work of authentically grounded power as they reverberate in the void of our geopolitics. Onshore or off, the phrase “ beyond the line ” includes an exceptional or unregularized geography carried by maritime movements as well. Schmitt argued that “ when the great pioneering powers of Europe struck out towards the world oceans, this immeasurable broadening of the known world resulted in a qualitatively new conception of physical space. The opening of the world oceans created the cultural context in which the universe could be conceived of as an infinite, empty space. ” ²⁵ The internalization of this empty depth was seen in new modes of political thought, painterly perspective, literature, and philosophy. “ Released from the limits and inhibitions of traditional spatial intuition, the ruling classes of Europe were mentally equipped to become the masters of the world. ” The emptying out of intuitive anthropometric space was the starting point for the arrival of a universal spatial order based on mathematical formalization and geographic interchangeability. Decade after decade, this groundless materialism was radicalized over again by mechanical production, industrial flight, modern chemistry, and, eventually, we now understand, digital computing. As said, from the sky looking down, the sea and the land are both flat planes full of points located in a universally matching coordinate system, virtualizing the immediate perception of geography in motion. “ Air space, ” writes Cornelia Vissman, “ seems to engender constructed images of space rather than space-experience. ” ²⁶ This protocinematic flattening of natural dimensions, where the Earth itself is seen merely as a “ thicker version of the sky, ” disheartened Schmitt, who saw it as a catastrophic ephemeralization of the embodied occupation of the Earth that should underwrite durable human geopolitics. Instead, that architecture would now be built on the unreliable footing of overwhelming synthetic speed and the screen of false equivalences. ²⁷ This is because “ movement makes space, rather than happens in, space ” ²⁸ and because this abstract global sphere is not properly occupied, it offers space that is merely measured. For Schmitt, it is less physically defended than divided up like an algebraic equation, ²⁹ and it is the spacelessness of the twentieth century that the contemporary geopolitics provides, with none of the rooted limits of solid fortresses and true walls and no true distinction between friend and enemy. Without these, Schmitt warned of an era inaugurated not only by global war but of total war of all against all. ³⁰

According to this line of thought, the deconcretizing of space instates a geopolitical simulacrum spinning in an endlessly self-available matrix. It can never finally govern because it can never find a solid ground on which to erect institutions capable of durable distinction between inside and out, us and them. At the same time, however, this universalism, “ homogeneous … and morally and legally malleable, ” also has for Schmitt a certain ethnic and economic odor. It is highly functional for certain forms of capture and exploitation, namely English and American forms, which would not defeat their military enemies but instead “ disqualify ” them by policing moral and technical incapabilities with “ universal ” architectures that are in fact extensions of their own specific interests. This counterhegemonic move undergirds how some on the contemporary left, have made use of Schmittian concepts, against what they take to be a US-centric neo-Wilsonian empire building, and instead in the service of a multipolar geopolitical architecture that is heterogeneous and programmatically antiuniversalist. ³¹ For Schmitt, but not for most of these leftist deployments, that multipolarity is also couched in transnational Gro ß raum (for ASCII , Grossraum), or “ great spaces ” or spheres of influences and domains of dominion over which dominant political cultures reserve systemic sovereignty, such as the US Monroe Doctrine claims over North and South American continental space. However, to establish what the nomos of the Cloud may or may not be, it is necessary to counter the misrecognition of the extraordinary spacefulness of global information networks, tracking their ongoing occupation, settlement, and doctrinal composition. We will observe the technically necessary and politically limited universality through which platforms can cohere polities, and toward that, we will look more closely at the grossraum, the type of claims it makes and could make (and how hard it is to decide its inside from its outside).

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The Nomos of the Cloud